Anyone who has purchased or sold a home remembers the piles and piles of paper! As technology advances, realtors and lenders alike are finding ways to eliminate the amount of paper that they have to carry around and store related to sales. Executive Title (part of well-known Stewart Title) has made the move from stacks of paper to a completely paperless office.

Executive Title and many others in the industry are making this move thanks to a program called SureClose. SureClose is a secure, web-based file management system which can maintain records on buyers, sellers, listings, and all the documents associated with loans and closing escrow. The system allows the company to communicate electronically with all involved parties and allow password-protected access to all files which have been scanned into the system for safe storage.

"Being a paperless office is advantageous in a hurricane area. At our office
in Punta Gorda last year all our files were scanned, while our competition lost
18 years of files, so a little security goes a long way."
~ Douglas C. Stevens, Senior Vice President, Executive Title

Soon, the days of lost paperwork holding up the close of escrow will be a distant memory. Closing documents will no longer need 30 signatures, one scanned signature populate all the necessary lines, or an "e-signature" will be acceptable. In the case of a natural disaster, the documents can all be retrieved from the database and life will move on.

But does this new system make it too easy to complete transactions - so easy that buyers will not read all the important documents that their e-signature is being attached to? Although the idea of being completely paperless sounds fantastic, I worry that buyers will get sucked in and pressured to just click through the docs and finish without catching mistakes or reading the terms fully.